Pipe welding to join pipes and fittings is a technique utilized in many industries ranging from residential to industrial construction projects, including, but not limited to, pipelines for oil, gas, water, etc., as well as power, pulp and paper, petro-chemical, food and drug processing, and ship and submarine building and repair industries. Pipes were used to be joined together via consumable rings or inserts inserted between two pipe ends to hold the two pipes together during welding. However, these consumable rings or inserts have a short life cycle when exposed to atmospheric conditions, thus requiring that prefabricated pipe modules be fitted and joined in a relatively short period of time. Otherwise, the consumable ring must be replaced requiring that the fitting procedure be restarted.
To assist in the welding process, a variety of pipe alignment tools were developed to radially position and align the ends of pipes and pipe fittings together to be joined by welding. The tools longitudinally align two ends of pipe sections in relation to each other. These pipe alignment tools generally include two spaced apart rings, lugs, or chains mounted on pipe ends to be joined. The rings, lugs, or chains are mounted and adjusted using a plurality of screws and bolts. Some drawbacks of these tools are that they are bulky, heavy, and difficult to maneuver. The plurality of screws and bolts require long assembly time.
In addition, most of the currently available tools are used to join two straight pipe sections together. While there are tools available that enable joining a straight pipe to an elbow or ell-fitting, many of these tools fit only one type of pipe or fitting connections. As such, separate tools are required to fit different types of connections—e.g., one tool to fit a straight pipe to pipe connection and another tool to fit pipe to ell-fitting connection. An existing tool that attempts to solve this problem utilizes a pair of closely spaced rings mounted in short proximity to the pipe ends, which are usually coextensive. However, not all pipe ends have enough space to mount such an alignment tool. Also, because of the proximity of the tool rings, this tool hinders the workspace of the welder who needs to get in between the pipe rings to weld the pipes. In addition, many tools are only capable of fitting over a pipe with perfectly rounded cross section, but not, for example, over the ends of tee pipe fitting or cross pipe fittings with imperfect cross sections formed due to the bend of the branch portion of the fitting.
Thus, there is a need for an alignment tool for positioning and aligning tubular sections that is compact, light weight, greatly speeds up attaching the tool to tubular sections, and which can be used to join various types of pipes and pipe fittings.